Syed Akbar
Hyderabad: A city astrophysicist has debunked the long-held
belief over the existence of an elusive particle called the God
Particle or the Higgs Boson that has supposedly given birth to the
universe.
Hopes of detecting the Higgs Boson have faded with the closure of the
Tevatron, a particle acceccelator at the Fermi National Laboratory in
the USA.
According to Dr BG Sidharth, director-general of BM Birla Science
Centre, in recent months it was calculated that the Higgs Boson would
have a mass of around 145 GeV, well within the radar of the Tevatron.
"So in all probability it should have been detected, if it existed at
all," he pointed out.
The Higgs Boson is a corner stone of what is called the Standard Model
of particle physics which stood its ground for a few decades. This
particle has also been called the God Particle because as originally
conceived by the British physicist Peter Higgs in mid 1960s this
particle would endow mass to all other particles in the universe.
"Mass can be generated without the requirement of the Higgs Boson," he
pointed out.
"If the Higgs Boson does not indeed exist as now appears probable,
this would be nothing short of an upheaval, calling for major
modification in our ideas of physics perhaps even theories of the
birth and early life universe," Dr Sidharth said.
Coming as it does on the heels of the discovery of faster than light
neutrinos this would indicate that 20th century physics, "which we
have considered to be more or less perfect, is not the last word", he
added.
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